Fujitsu and NEC Complete Construction of Asia Submarine-Cable Express (ASE)

Fujitsu Limited and NEC Corporation announced that they have completed construction of all initially planned segments of the Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE) system, a high-bandwidth optical submarine cable system that extends across approximately 7,800 km to link Japan with the Philippines, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore.

NTT Communications, Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company, Telekom Malaysia Berhad, and StarHub Limited placed an order for the new system in January 2011.

The connection of Hong Kong to the system, in addition to Japan, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia, for which construction was completed last August and service has already begun, means that ASE now connects major cities in East and South-East Asia as a high-capacity (40Gbps per wave, max capacity 15Tbps) submarine cable system employed in services offered by NTT Communications and other participating carriers.

For the new system, NEC provided the submarine cables, submersible repeaters and submersible OADM branching units, as well as subsea monitoring equipment and power feeding equipment. Fujitsu provided the Submarine Line Terminal Equipment and the Networking Management System.

Employing the latest 40Gbps digital coherent optical transmissions technology(1), ASE will ensure communications capacity that can sufficiently accommodate surging Internet data traffic in Asian countries, as well as growing data traffic resulting from the rapid spread of smart devices. In addition, plans are in place to utilize the system to provide high-quality and low-latency dedicated line service that can also be leveraged for the carriers’ cloud services.